During the past couple years, the good folks over at Gestalt IT have been working to find more ways to make sure that the Tech Field Day delegates feel that their time has been valued and put to good use. One of the ways they’ve been doing that is to use some of the down time to record podcasts.

At one of the Storage Field Days I attended, I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to sit on a podcast panel to discuss “abandonware” — especially in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT).

What’s abandonware? It’s what happens when you have a networked device that still works, but is no longer supported by its manufacturer — or worse, whose manufacturer has gone out of business. Lack of support for the device means no more software updates, which means no security patches. Unpatched devices on your network leave your network vulnerable. Continue reading →

Today Turbonomic announced a new release of their autonomic management suite, version 5.9. The new version adds new capabilities, expanding their automated management into hybrid cloud environments, as well as a number of performance enhancements.

With this release, Turbonomic is furthering their mission: to enable their customers to automate and control any workload, on any infrastructure, any time, and any place.

What’s New in 5.9

I’ll summarize what I see as the key new things Turbonomic has added in version 5.9. Continue reading →

It’s that time of year again when you’re seeing lots of “Vote for Me!” blog posts and tweets. This is not one of those posts.

Yes, once again, Eric Seibert is running voting for the Top vBlog of 2017 on his really great blog vSphere-Land. (If it’s not already in whatever you’ve moved to since Google Reader went away, take a moment to add it now. I’ll wait.) Again this year, Turbonomic is helping to sponsor the voting.

So, no, I’m not going to ask you to rush over there and vote for me. I am, however going to ask you to go there sometime before voting closes on 30 June 2017 and vote for the blogs (you can choose 12 of them) that you find to be:

The most helpful

The most informative

The best

In the Big Scheme of ThingsTM, does being voted on of the Top vBlogs of 2017 really matter? No. No, it doesn’t.

However, I know that your favorite bloggers will definitely appreciate seeing their blog rise up a little higher in the rankings. I know that a lot of folks out there put a lot of time and effort into their postings — almost all of it during their “free” time — and almost all of them aren’t making any money off of their blogs. (Full Disclosure: From sponsorship, this blog earned slightly more than enough money to cover my hosting fees in 2016, netting approximately $16 USD for the entire year.

So thank them by taking the time to vote for the folks you read and are informed by, whoever they are — I know they’ll appreciate it. (Don’t get me wrong — if you’re having trouble thinking of who to give your 12th vote to, I’ll happily take it, but it won’t bother me in the least if you don’t vote for me at all, as long as you took the time to vote for folks you believe deserve the recognition.)

First things first: I want to thank everyone who has followed along and supported me during the recent job search. It’s meant a lot to me to know that I was never really alone during it.

A special thank you to all of you who contacted me and acted as “connectors”, connecting me to people, companies, and job opportunities.

During the search, a few people asked me why I kept mentioning my job search on social media. My answer was always the same — every time I mention the job search, someone new contacts me with ideas, suggestions, or to help connect me to a job opportunity I was previously unaware of. In fact, a tweet about my job search is directly responsible for connecting me to my new job. I’ll do a future blog post with more details about how social media helped my job search.

But, none of that is what you came here to read at the moment. You came here to hear about:

My New Job

I’m very happy to announce that, starting today, I’m joining the team at Virtustream.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Virtustream is a cloud provider. (And one of the Dell Technologies companies.) Their offerings are designed for enterprises and global IT organizations. While they’re not a “household name” like the “Big Three” in cloud (AWS, Azure, and Google) are, I think Virtustream’s in a great place to get there because of the things that make them different than the Big Three.

The main difference I see is that using any of the Big Three is essentially a do-it-yourself experience. While you can do it all yourself with Virtustream, they also offer a full suite of managed services to choose from. Additionally, they also have offerings specifically built for Enterprises, for Federal, and for Healthcare.

What Will I Be Doing?

In the job posting, the official job title was listed as:

Senior Consultant: Technical Product Marketing

But, yeah, that doesn’t really tell you much about what I’ll actually be doing.

I’ll be in an individual contributor role, working with almost every team within Virtustream to create technical content, both for internal and external use. This will include articles, presentations, white papers, trainings, videos, whiteboards, demos, blog posts, and, well, pretty much any other format that folks would find as an effective way to consume information.

The job looks to be the perfect mix of “everybody already has a good idea of what they need from me” and “go forth to create and define this role for yourself”.

As a big plus, I’ll be getting to work with several folks I’ve known for years now who have not only earned my professional respect, but who I also actually like a lot.

So I’ll still be working with storage and virtualization, but I’ll also be moving that work deeper into the Cloud than I have in the past. Definitely looking forward to it.

If you’ve ever listened to, or been involved in, a conversation about Cloud, you’re familiar with the idea that the infrastructure that runs any specific cloud can be either on-premises (local or private cloud), off-premises (remote or public cloud), or a combination of both (hybrid cloud).

If you’re familiar with that, then I feel safe predicting that you’re also familiar with the seemingly-eternal debate over whether the term is “premises”, “premise”, or if it actually matters. In this case, there is, in fact, only one correct answer.

In the rest of this article, I will:

Make the clear case for the correct answer

Explain why it does, in fact, matter

Discuss three approaches for handling this, including a proposed solution that, if adopted, would end the premises/premise confusion in cloud forever

Today, at Dell EMC World, Virtustream — the enterprise-class cloud provider company in the Dell Technologies family of businesses — announced that they are offering a new service called Virtustream Healthcare Cloud.

This service provides cloud-based hosting of mission-critical healthcare platforms and applications in an environment that is completely compliant with all Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) regulations. Customers are able to get the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud with fully-managed services and availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of 99.999% uptime. The service can be deployed in both public and hybrid cloud models.

As healthcare organizations transition to the near-exclusive use of digital Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, they are faced with the dual challenges of access to records and securing them. EMR data needs to be accessible to patients, doctors, and analytical medicine applications, all while remaining fully-secure and compliant with a complex set of regulations. The Virtustream Healthcare Cloud offering enables healthcare organizations to achieve these goals as a managed service.

To give an idea of why this is a big deal, several other public cloud providers will allow customers to run this type of workload in their infrastructure, but the customers are 100% responsible for ensuring the HIPAA and HITECH compliance. The Virtustream Healthcare Cloud provides that compliance built-in.

With consolidation happening across the industry, and more hospitals and healthcare organizations joining into collaborative “Medical Group” type organizational structures, the ability to store, protect, and share EMRs in a secure and compliant public cloud solution becomes even more desirable.

Today, the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud service has been certified by Epic, a leading provider of EMR applications. I’ve spoken with a few of the folks at Virtustream and I believe we’ll see the certification with additional EMR software vendors coming in the near future.

As you might have expected from a conference that was essentially created by combining two huge tech events (Dell World and EMC World), there were a large number of announcements made on the first day of Dell EMC World 2017. To help you manage the influx of so much information, this post will attempt to summarize them for you.

NetApp has announced the first members of their new community recognition program, called NetApp United. I’m proud to announce that I’m one of those 111 people.

What makes a good candidate for the NetApp United program? According to the application announcement, NetApp was looking for technology enthusiasts who:

Have a social media presence

Have overall expertise within the technology industry

Are a member of the technical community in good standing

Are interested in learning more about NetApp products and services

My own NetApp experience dates back to 1993, when I installed several of the first Network Appliance “file toasters” to be purchased in the New England area. Back then the NetApp boxes were often replacing larger and more expensive Auspex NAS devices (although we hadn’t yet started using the term “NAS” at that point). Never heard of Auspex? NetApp is a lot of the reason for that…

More recently, in my last job I got quite familiar with Solidfire‘s scale-out all-Flash arrays. Solidfire joined the NetApp family through acquisition.

I look forward to meeting my fellow NetApp United members and seeing back this program brings in the coming year.

Today Pure Storage, known for their All-Flash Storage arrays, announced their next Big ThingTM, DirectFlash, as well as a new FlashArray model. DirectFlash is a combination of NVMe hardware and the software to manage it (more details on that below). The new array model, the FlashArray//X, uses exclusively DirectFlash as the storage medium.

A Brief Flash Primer

“Flash” refers to silicon-based memory chips used for storage. It tends to come in one of two form factors.

The first is Solid State Drives (SSD). These typically have the same dimensions as hard-disk drives (HDD) and connect via either SATA or (more typically) SAS interfaces.

The second is Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). These use (not surprisingly) non-volatile memory chips to store data. The “Express” in the name indicates that it connects via PCIe which is not only higher bandwidth than SATA or SAS, but is both physically and logically closer to the storage controllers, making NVMe faster and higher bandwidth than SSD. NVMe is often 5X faster than SSD.